Obama sets tweets-per-minute record

9/7/12 3:55 AM EDT

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — President Barack Obama's speech at Thursday night's Democratic convention set a record for the most tweets in a single minute of any political event, according to Twitter's internal data.

Twitter reports 52,756 tweets in the minute after Obama's speech — a new record for a political event and on par with Usain Bolt's final race in the 2012 Olympic relay, Twitter spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo told POLITICO.

The Democrats also received far more tweets than the Republicans. The final day of the Democratic convention delivered roughly 4 million tweets, according to the internal data, roughly equal to all three days of the Republican convention:

Many of today’s 4 million Tweets were sent during the president’s acceptance speech. @barackobama delivered a great collection of tweetable lines this evening, and Twitter responded accordingly. His five top peaks in tweets per minute were actually all higher than any other moment for a speaker in either convention. The moments in his speech that elicited the biggest Twitter reactions were:

-43,646: “I'm no longer just the candidate, I'm the President”
-39,002: “I will never turn medicare into a voucher”
-38,597: Discussing Medicare
-37,694: “We don’t think government can solve all our problems…”
-34,572: Quips about the Olympics and “Cold War mind warp”

Twitter is also running a political sentiment index during the conventions, which found that responses to both Obama and Mitt Romney grew more negative after their speeches, whereas responses to former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama grew more positive.

But Filadelfo said that negative responses to the candidates were driven, in part, by attacks from the opposing party.

"As the more prominent speakers take center stage, it inspires more reactions from the opposition," Filadelfo said.

The data also show significant growth for Twitter, which on Election Day in 2008 saw 1.8 million Tweets about anything, period.